


leave my gun in the field and pray it stays buried under dust like history

by riverbed



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - Western, F/F, Infidelity, Past Relationship(s), Pining, shooting your lover's a mess i'll tell you whut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-19
Updated: 2016-06-19
Packaged: 2018-07-15 22:57:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7242214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/riverbed/pseuds/riverbed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I shot you,” she repeats. “I never thought… I’m<i> sorry,</i> Al. I didn’t mean for it to go this far. You just… you get my head so damn messed, you get me all lit up and before I know it I've… shot you. You said stuff that I… I just can’t ever forgive you for, Alex.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	leave my gun in the field and pray it stays buried under dust like history

**Author's Note:**

> old west lesbian au where hamilton survives the duel and burr is just trying to keep up
> 
> warnings for guns, descriptions of blood and injuries, gratuitously fawned over fabrics. me being gay. but you all knew that.

Burr lowers her pistol.

The deed has been done. The hush in the air is more empty than Burr had imagined it would be, not pregnant with anticipation like she’d predicted. But, then again, there’s not much to anticipate. Hamilton lies on the ground, oddly silent, and there is a moment where Burr panics, regret flooding her in a rush. She approaches Hamilton’s limp body, hem of her fine dress in the mud. The blood is soaking copper into the crimson satin of her bodice, just barely distinguishable from the fabric, both shades wet and bright. There’s something strange about the way the bullet had ripped through Hamilton’s clothes and left a hole, ragged at the edges. Something Burr can’t put her finger on but which seems to make it register, the reality of this, the absurdity of it.

She drops to her knees, reaches out but for nothing, because Hamilton’s friends are already lifting her to cart her away. Blood is pooled on the ground where she’d lain. Burr reaches out and places her palm full in it, slick and sticky against the dust-covered ground. She turns, walks, numb, to the tree behind her, searches for the place where Hamilton’s bullet has pierced its trunk and touches her bloodsoaked fingers to the bark. An appeal, she thinks, possibly.

Burr’s companion has already ridden back into town in the company of Hamilton’s camp to await news. Burr mounts her horse and rides off the opposite way, toward home. It’s all she can do, to wait, and it’d be better not to do it in the crowded saloon, for once news reaches the townsfolk either way she’ll be vilified even more than she already is. Hamilton, sleazy but charming, is a popular person. It won’t matter that she’d insulted Burr’s character, her honor; it won’t matter that she’d threatened her daughter. The only facts they’ll have are these: Two guns raised eye-level. Two bullets fired. Two pistols on the ground. One bullet on target, and one off.

Had Hamilton really missed? Burr sits at her table, nursing a glass of whisky, thinking it over. Is she meant to believe that Hamilton, a sure shot, a known if humble markswoman, actually missed a still target as large as a human body? Had Hamilton simply not negotiated for the wind, for the distance, for Burr’s height? An accidental miss seems implausible. 

But an intentional miss seems equally unlikely, and drums up implications that make Burr’s head spin. There are two possibilities, in that case: that Hamilton had been harboring a death wish, or that she’d set Burr up, that she’d taken her commitment to destroying Burr’s reputation to a conclusion beyond comprehension. Burr feels some heat at the second possibility but her blood boils at the first. That Hamilton would, after everything she’s fought through, accomplished, changed, after all the work she’s done and progress she’s been responsible for, throw it all away, willfully leave her family behind for the sake of a legacy that’s tied together neatly with a bow… Aaron presses the cool glass of whisky and ice to her forehead and cheek. She’s sweating from stress, and she pulls some of her personal papers over from across the table, some sketches. She fans through the pages absently, comes upon some sketches of Hamilton, stretched out languid or framed by scribbled flowers, memories of days spent riding hard with no destination just for the rush of adrenaline that came from hauling ass against the wind. There are choices they both made, things they both handled badly, regret which Burr has never felt the full weight of, lingering in the slide of the pages against one another. Alex had scrawled on some of the pictures, playful critiques of her own features, though not Burr’s portrayal of them - a line from her bare stomach in one points out in her loopy hand that Burr has made her slimmer out of flattery, though Burr does not recall doing so consciously. It’s been years, and god, when did that happen, but she can still remember the warm velvet feel of Hamilton’s skin, the soft give of her hips. She remembers Hamilton in her bed, dark hair spread out across the pillow as she’d slept.

The afternoon sun is high in the sky but Burr draws the thick curtains shut and strips, curls up in her nightgown on her messy bed. She studies her hands. The blood is still rust flaking off her right palm.

 

* * *

 

Hamilton survives.

Burr gets correspondence from her few remaining contacts in town, notification that Hamilton is home, with her husband, with her children. There’s a strange breeze that morning as Burr stands on her porch and looks out at the prairie beyond the town, an eerie music whistling through the branches. Aaron laces her boots up tight and her trip to Hamilton’s door takes all of five minutes. Eli greets her at the front, his mouth set in an unsurprised line.

“This is it,” he tells her, as his youngest daughter hides behind his leg. “If I stop you going in there now, she’ll never forgive me, but if you come around here again I’ll kill you myself.” This he lets hang in the air as he walks off, leaving Burr alone in the entryway. Burr wanders toward the back of the house, a bit stunned, finds the door she knows to be Alex’s office, set behind the stairs. She raps on the wood, tries the knob and finds it unlocked.

Hamilton’s office is as scattered as her mind, haphazard arrangements of papers and dog-eared books strewn along the shelves. It’s comforting, kind of a safe storm. The office is where Hamilton contains her fury, the box she uses to shield her family from the worst of her. Eli has never been interested in Alex’s cleverness with insults, never cared for the quickness of her tongue. Burr has seen her in deep, after a rant made Alex feel shaky and unsafe and like she couldn’t leave the room. She’s cried in here on Burr’s shoulder, but now she sits at her desk like it’s any other day, like she hadn’t been shot a fortnight ago.

Burr closes the door and leans back into it, studying the grain of the wood with her palms flat against it behind her. She realizes she’d come here without a plan, the need to see Hamilton blinding. “You let me shoot you,” she says quietly.

Alex closes a drawer in her desk, flips her braid behind her shoulder. She looks at Burr, looks her up and down. Burr finds herself frustrated that her presence seems not to disrupt Hamilton; she looks relaxed, shoulders back, eyes wide and attentive. Burr remembers them glazed over with pain on the afternoon of their duel, as she’d walked toward her, lying on the ground. Unsettling, the idea that Hamilton could ever be unaware of what was going on around her. And now it seems that this entire thing has disturbed Burr more than it ever could Hamilton.

“Your aim was good,” Hamilton says. She ventures a daring wink. “Better than I remember, anyway.” Burr scoffs. Her heels click across the floor as she approaches the desk, and she slams her hands upon it, leans down to get eye-level with Hamilton.

“Alex, why,” she says, voice rumbling with implied threat. To her credit, Hamilton doesn’t cower, doesn’t retreat - she holds her gaze, eyes level and hardening by the moment. Burr watches it happen, sees the exact second her window of opportunity closes again.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Alex says. Her eyes narrow further as Burr gets in her face, heat radiating off the both of them as their proximity decreases.

“Why did you,” and Burr changes tactics, comes around the desk as she speaks, “miss your shot? Why was your aim so off?”

Hamilton reclines in her seat, manages to shrug but Burr sees the wince that flits across her features, the wrinkle of her sharp nose. “Bad day.”

“Don’t think so.” Aaron stands practically on top of Hamilton, crowding into her space. Her voice gets low when she speaks, hushed in the small wood-paneled room. “We both know you calculated that shot to miss. Why not shoot true? I don’t appreciate you handing it to me as if I’m incapable, and I don’t even want to think about why you might have wanted me to shoot you. To frame me as the villain? Jesus, Al, to get yourself six feet under?”

Hamilton’s eyes narrow again but now it looks more sad than accusatory. “You  _ are _ the villain here, Burr.” She straightens some papers into a neat little pile. “You called for the duel. I can’t help your reactions to how I write about you.”

Burr collapses back against the wall behind Alex’s desk. She’s exhausted. She doesn’t want to do this. “Did you have to paint me like you did?” she asks, her voice smaller than she would have hoped. “What  _ happened, _ Alex? How did we get here?”

Alex stands and crosses to stand in front of Burr, a hand on the wall to the side of her. Burr reaches out with a shaky hand, places it on her flank. “I shot you,” she says, feeling the threatening heat of tears behind her eyes. She messes with the hem of Alex’s camisole, slips her hand up under the fabric and sees the way Alex gasps. Burr stares at her as she traces the frayed edges of the bandage. Alex holds her bottom lip between her teeth and looks away, focusing on a spot on the wall to the left of Burr’s head. Aaron circles her thumb around the skin of Alex’s stomach above the wrapped wound. “I shot you,” she repeats. “I never thought… I’m  _ sorry, _ Al. I didn’t mean for it to go this far. You just… you get my head so damn messed, you get me all lit up and before I know it I've… shot you. You said stuff that I… I just can’t ever forgive you for, Alex."

Alex groans, drops her head to Burr’s shoulder. Her hair smells faintly of floral perfume, too familiar, and it makes Aaron’s heart thrum painfully in her chest. “I tried to say I was sorry,” Alex says softly. “I never meant… Eli forgave me but I had to make it right, set the record straight to protect my kids. They come first.”

Burr feels her blood boil. “So I was - what? Your dirty secret? Your extra on the side?” She squeezes Alex’s side, watching her wince, hearing her breath shorten and shake. “That's bull and shit, and you know it. You trash me publicly, clear your good name, and leave me to rot, and this whole time you been tellin’ yourself that it was for the good of your  _ family?" _

“Well, you can go to hell with all that,” she says, recoiling from the warmth of Alex’s skin - she mourns the loss, thinks of how it’d feel to sink into it now. The thought reviles her, makes the hairs on the back of her neck prick up. She backs herself up though she has no place to go, pressing herself against the wall. “No way you weren't as complicit as I was. I can't accept that, Alex, that's-”

She cuts herself off. Alex is biting her fingernails. Aaron had the nagging urge to reach out and yank her hand away from her mouth, force her to focus. 

“We both did what we had to,” Alex says quietly. She turns away, pushes herself off the wall and goes back to her desk. Burr can’t see through the heat of her tears but she hears Hamilton shuffling things about and knows she has gone back to work. She hides her face as she rushes out, and Alex doesn’t try to call her back, doesn’t follow her out, and she swings up sidesaddle onto her mare and kicks off, feeling shame and rage course through her so hard it threatens to break through her skin.

 

* * *

__

One thing about this new and harsh western country: it sure knows how to storm.

When Burr wakes it’s because a pool of water is lapping at the corner of her mouth. She flails her hands out around her, registers more from the sound than the sensation that they are slapping against wet ground. She props herself up, blinks at her surroundings. Rain splashes in sheets on the arid ground, sloshing into rivulets that feed into the ditch Burr is lying in. She picks her head up and groans as sharp pain shoots up her spine and through her neck; she must have fallen and hit her head.

Her horse is gone. The rainfall is so thick that Aaron can barely see through it, but she thinks she makes out lights up ahead. There are no landmarks she can see, and she isn’t sure where she’d ridden - hopefully it’s friends on the horizon. 

Standing proves a challenge, her head swimming, but she doesn’t think anything is too badly hurt - ankles feel fine, knees flex correctly. She stumbles a bit on a rock that’s partially covered by mud, but manages not to fall. She heads toward the light, irony not lost on her.

If it’s time, then she’ll go. She’d always found the rain soothing.

But it’s cold, and she doesn’t think cold exists in purgatory. She pulls her soaked wool capelet round herself and huddles into it, fighting to find any warmth it might offer. She thinks briefly that it’s simply soaking through her dress, probably making it worse. Thunder rolls from behind her in the flatlands. She hurries, tripping again and again in her haste, feeling like the lights are dimming before her eyes.

She’s in the gate before she processes where she is. Knocks on the door anyway, because she’s desperate and the closest neighbors are two miles down the road, and Alex’s eyes are wide as she opens the door. “What are you doing?” she asks, but it’s not an accusation, and she looks Burr up and down as she says it, taking in the condition of her dress, the water soaking into her boots. And she’s left off that key piece - What are you doing, but not What are you doing  _ here, _ and Burr lets herself think she belongs here one last time.

She shuffles her feet. Lightning claps, the sky a bright flash for a split second. Burr can see the wrinkles slowly setting their way into Hamilton’s skin, the gauntness of her face in the eerie and sudden white, and then the shadows cast on her high cheekbones as the sky fades to purple once more. Alex hastens Burr into the foyer, eyes darting nervously about as she slams the door against the storm, and pulls off her cape in one fluid motion. She lets it fall from her hand to the floor as Burr studies her; Hamilton’s hair is down, in loose, thick waves, dark against the shoulders of her nightgown, once pure white but faded to a soft ivory over the years of wear. She knows Hamilton has others, but keeps this one, because it reminds her of Philip being a newborn. Things she’d told Burr in confidence, casual things that drew them closer, things probably not even her husband knows. Alex has lost weight, and the garment hangs a little loose on her frame now. Burr longs to tug the neckline down and study the jut of her collarbone, but she flexes her fists at her sides, shivers running down her arms under the raindrops that drip off her knuckles. Hamilton runs her eyes down Burr’s body as tangible as fingertips. Aaron remembers them.

“God. Come on, let’s get you into fresh clothes.” She turns, heads off down the hall without looking back to be sure Burr is following her, and Burr toes off her boots, feeling the leather stretch and warp to unusability, before she does. Hamilton is not taking care to keep quiet, and when they reach her private bedroom the door is left open behind them. Aaron asks, unable to help herself.

“We had a fight.” Alex’s back is to her. She jumps as another bolt of lightning hits outside, windows flashing. She pulls a camisole from the bureau, studies it with her lips pursed. “Eli took the children to their grandpa’s for a few days. He’ll hate me, but what ya gonna do. The kids need the fresh air, anyway.” She turns and knocks very nearly into Burr. There’s a moment where they’re inches apart, eyes matching saucers and breath coming short and quiet. Then Alex seems to shake it off and steps back.

She thrusts the clothing in her hand to Burr’s chest, letting her hand linger for what Aaron thinks might be a deliberate moment. “C’mon,” she says quietly, looking down. “You’ll feel better, once you’re dry.”

Alex turns away. Aaron lifts her shaking fingers to the buttons of her two-piece, the slick fabric sliding against her thumbs as she undoes the fastenings. Her still-wet hair drips on her shoulders once she’s bare, down her spine, and she pauses to squeeze it out into her soiled dress. She chokes back tears at the state of the thing - those were expensive clothes. She’s still struggling, on the way up but not out of the woods yet. She tries not to panic, tries not to think about being on her back for another of this town’s men in order to justify a replacement. Just when she thinks she’s put it behind her old habits come back to haunt. Just like this. This proximity to Hamilton.

She gets the camisole on, the cotton bloomers. The latter are a little large on her, her slim hourglass shape in contrast to Hamilton’s small but rounded frame. She remembers Hamilton’s hips and wonders if they’re still the same with less meat on her, tries to imagine her post-childbearing body, the possible scars and ridges in her skin, but draws a blank. All she has, these past few years, are the dregs of attention she grasps at, the slander Hamilton stirs up by namedropping her in public, and her memory, which she notices becoming more and more eager to recede. It feels like strings she has to yank at harder and harder to get anything; these two moments alone with Hamilton, two in twenty-four hours, feel like repose, like a languid, indulgent dream. Despite their less-than-ideal circumstance.

She shuffles toward Alexandra and brushes a hand over her shoulder, catches the start that runs through her. She stays facing away from her, though, toward the wall. “Aren’t you gonna ask me what happened?”

Alex’s answer comes quiet, almost a whisper. “Don’t much care. I’m kind of glad it did.” Burr curls her hand over her shoulder and Alex turns, presses her nose to the still-freezing knuckles. Burr is afraid to ask why, afraid she knows the answer.  _ You’re here. Here we are. _

“We gotta talk,” she says, but she dares to flex her hand and brush her fingers against Alex’s chin. It’s awkward, a weird angle, a strange touch. It feels exactly like fire sparking off in Aaron’s blood.

“Yeah,” Hamilton breathes, and turns. Her eyes are wide and her mouth is open. But she doesn’t talk.

 

* * *

 

Aaron always sleeps restlessly and wakes early. She’s up at dawn, pacing down the halls of Hamilton’s house. She hovers outside the office behind the stairs, running her fingers down the door. The doorknob, when she brushes it, is cool to the touch. There is a draft in this part of the building, a creak in the floorboards under her footfalls. She steps over the threshold without really meaning to and finds herself in the center of Hamilton’s head.

The clutter is misleading. The place is impeccably clean, dustless. She runs her hands over the surfaces of old books, Victorian romances mixed in among philosophical texts, international mythology. Fairy tales, an old beat-up book of them. She palms this, thinking it over. Sits at the desk and lets it flip open to where it might.

She is about halfway through  _ Thumbelina, _ Danish alongside a handy English translation, when Hamilton clears her throat from the doorway. She is leaning against it in her stocking feet, a pair of wool socks pulled up to her knees. There’s an amused smile playing at her lips, and Burr breathes out, relieved - she could easily be angry with the invasion of privacy, righteously so. Burr supposes there might be a soft spot of some kind in Alex’s heart for her, but doesn’t let herself dwell on the possibility. It could, after all, simply be the fact that Burr has seen every last piece of this - this scattering of conflicting thoughts, violence and domesticity in a resounding, constant clash, before.

But she finds something new every time she’s let in. The fairy tales - they are a surprise.

Aaron studies the knots in the wood floor. Being in Hamilton’s space… it gets her mind going places she shouldn’t let it go. She remembers all of a sudden that she is not quite enough, less kind than Eli, less talented than Jonny Laurens, that girl Alex had clung to in their youth, a lanky, loud, sharpshooting tomboy with long unruly curls and wild eyes. Freckles all over, always wearing her little brother’s trousers, always with paper and a pen in her bag, shading in hasty, unflattering portraits. Laurens had a style that carried from the page to her manner, and Burr had been suspicious of their closeness but had for years tried to put it from her mind. And then Laurens had died, and Alex had gone to pieces, hiding for months, and had turned to Burr as a substitute, she had known, even at the time. She’s always the substitute.

“Everything I said - it was wrong,” Hamilton says after a moment.

“No, it wasn’t.” Burr pointedly does not look at her. She plants her feet on the floor beneath the desk, willing herself to go as still as a piece of furniture.

“Regardless.” Hamilton comes around the desk, encroaching on the space surrounding Burr. She flips the book closed with a soft  _ thump. _ The pages are lined with shimmering gold, and the red satin bookmark sits askew next to the spine in a wave. The cover is faded gray, an illustration barely visible. “I was wrong to say them.”

Burr looks up at her, then. She drops her bottom lip to speak, but all that comes out is a squeak of surprise. It’s as if Hamilton’s words had been delayed in sinking in. And she hadn’t been expecting - this. Hadn’t been expecting Alex Hamilton admitting, without prompting, that she’d been wrong.

Hamilton ignores the lapse. She’s always been good at keeping a conversation going with herself. “Where is Theo?” 

That one, Burr can answer. “She’s with a schoolfriend. I arranged for it for the week. Needed a few days to… process.” She rests her forehead in her palm, and senses Hamilton shifting around to the back of her, and then the sensation of her lips between her shoulder blades. Burr shivers, reaches back to grab Alex’s wrist where she’s twisting her hand into her hair to push it up, out of the way of her nape.

She swivels in the wooden chair. “Don’t,” Burr pleads, searching Alex’s eyes for understanding. “Last night was. We can’t.”

“We could,” Alex says. “Last night…” and she smiles, eyes going a little hazy. “Last night was just like it used to be. Don’t you miss that?”

“That’s not fair.” Aaron stands, suddenly anxious to move, suddenly needing to  _ run. _ She gets as far as the wall before turning on her heel, feeling backed into it like she had yesterday, pinned. Stuck. “You can’t bring me back into your life when it’s convenient. When your husband is  _ out of town. _ I won’t do that, I won’t be that for you.”

Alex looks hurt, a distinctive expression that Aaron has only seen flicker across her features a few times. She strides over, grabs Aaron’s wrists as if in an effort to keep her still. “I don’t think of you like that,” she says solemnly, a fierce light in her eyes. They turn a strange amber when she speaks so seriously, as if a fire is lit behind them in her passion. Burr feels hot with it, the possibility that that passion might be for her. Alex’s lips are pulled in a downward snarl. Aaron wants to coax more out of her, watch her carefully-honed anger sharpen and consume them both alive.

But she won’t. “I won’t.” She insists it, over and over again, eyes shut tight against the allure of Hamilton’s wide brown ones, until Alex drops her wrists and backs off. She’s far away by the time Burr feels composed enough to open her eyes, back by the desk, flipping through the storybook.

“My mother used to read me these,” she muses, and it’s infuriating, how quickly Hamilton can go from fervent to casual. But Burr does know the way Hamilton uses quiet, her practiced public speaking skills manipulating her volume and her cadence. Soft and slow, she continues. “I’d fall asleep, I guess swept up in the romance of another world. Then I came to the other world, and it wasn’t all I’d wanted. No smart princesses or naked kings. All the romance, all the folly here is a front, because everybody knows the harshness of this place and can’t bear to confront it.” She slams the book closed again and sighs. “I’ve been trying to make it better. Do what I can. Politics are - not a welcome place for women. You know this.” And she looks at Burr pointedly to emphasize. “The only way they listen to us is if we are fighting. They like the theatrics. Like they take us off the circuit, out of the brothel and the tavern, and put us on a press stage instead.”

Aaron fiddles with the hem on her borrowed camisole. It’s fine silk, like the things she used to wear. “They never took me out of the brothel,” she says quietly. “We were never on an even keel.”

Alex reaches toward her, jerks her hand back when she realizes what she’s doing. Sticks her thumbnail in her mouth and nibbles. The urge, again, to slap Hamilton’s hand away from her face. Aaron fights it down.

“I ain’t got what you got, Alex. The world hasn’t handed me anything. I gotta do what I can.”

Alex glares at her. “You think I got  _ handed _ this? You think that I -” she shakes her head, apparently disbelieving - “that all the  _ sweat _ and  _ blood, _ the  _ blood, _ Burr, the blood I’ve put in to get where I am is cancelled out by the fact I’ve got a husband and a big house? I’ve been fighting since I was a kid - you know that.” She softens out a bit, slumps against her own desk.

“You put in more blood than you need to,” Aaron says. She crowds in close, lays her hand over Alex’s side where the wound she’d driven into her body is, gentler than she had before. She consciously taps each of her fingers in turn, feeling the rise and fall of Alex’s abdomen under her hand as her breath hitches then returns to normal, a steady pattern.

“We both have,” Alex says. She lets it hang in the air for a moment. And then: “Neither of us can go back now.”

“I should go.”

“Stay.” Hamilton looks up, and Burr figures she’d probably meant to look seductive but the tears dripping off her lashes sort of nullify the expression. Burr kisses her eyelids anyway, plucks the wetness off her cheeks using her lips. It’s as close as she’ll get, but she lets herself have this moment, lets herself taste the salt off Hamilton’s skin. She’s tasted worse, things far more bitter and sad.

**Author's Note:**

> wasn't that fun
> 
> comments i love
> 
> find me in the fields


End file.
